Founded in June 1985, the Montreal Mirror is this city's original English language alternative weekly, and Montreal's premier source for quality, thought provoking journalism, in-depth arts and news coverage and comprehensive entertainment listings. Reaching nearly a quarter of a million...

Terms commonly used to describe transgender men and women fall into a gray area. Is it okay to call someone a transvestite? How do you determine a transgender person's preferred pronoun -- he or she -- without being offensive?

The Beaties have pushed our buttons and our boundaries about sexuality and gender identity because we're so used to thinking in binary terms: man/woman, masculine/feminine and gay/straight. The world's more complicated than that, as Thomas Beatie is certainly showing us.

Since 1977, state law has prohibited sex-change recipients from retroactively revising the sex designation on their birth certificates to correspond with their new gender identity. It is the only state with such a law.

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In August 2008, 18-year-old Fredy Villanueva was shot to death by a Montreal police officer. A subsequent police inquiry into the shooting was marred by controversy and resulted in a total exoneration of the two police officers involved.

Did capitalistic excess spare the lower Main? Maybe so. Christian Yaccarini’s Société de développement Angus had big plans to remake St-Laurent between René-Lévesque and de Maisonneuve that are, as of last week, dashed... or at least drastically scaled back.

François Pesant has had a busy 2010. The 34-year-old Montreal photojournalist arrived back home on Tuesday, Jan. 12, from five months in India and Sri Lanka. That same day, the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, destroying Port-au-Prince. He left five days later.

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There was a time in the ’90s where fighting games (most two players battling head-to-head in an arena, using six attack buttons and a joystick to deplete their opponents’ lifebar) were seemingly the favourite pastime of nearly every young male in North America.

For Sasha Van Bon Bon, there is an odd sense of nostalgia about the ’90s. The Mirror’s veteran sex columnist, who’s been doling out sage advice on all things carnal to readers for over 15 years, worked as a stripper for much of that decade.

Formed in Vancouver, the Olympic Resistance Network began mobilizing with the slogan “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.” Stolen, because most of the territories in British Columbia were never settled with treaties, like the rest of Canada.

François Pesant has had a busy 2010. The 34-year-old Montreal photojournalist arrived back home on Tuesday, Jan. 12, from five months in India and Sri Lanka. That same day, the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, destroying Port-au-Prince. He left five days later.

She’s a dub poet, author, actor, playwright, teacher and social activist. But d’bi.young insists, “It’s all storytelling.” For the Jamaican-Canadian artist, there’s enough cooking on every burner to make the rest of us look like hopeless slackers.